The Internet of creation disappeared. Now we have surveillance and control

I now have my own stupid blog again[0] trying to add some good old fun and weirdness to the web along with some hopefully useful or thought-provoking posts in between.

I wish we could have a thread (possibly even a monthly thread here, like who is hiring) where people could mention their blogs, web sites etc.

Back when Google+ arrived we did that and I followed a number of interesting people from HN based on that I think.

Maybe it could help us rebuild a mini web of interesting blogs, websites etc.

Me, I'd be particularly interested in linking to pages related to electronics, programming, outdoors (but not slick "travel" blogs) etc. A little politics OK, but not much.

[0]: link in profile should anyone be interested.

This is such important advice across so many aspects of life in general! It's easy to support a movement that's already started to to gain momentum. Something I think about still from my college days is actually from a sociology class I took as an easy requirement filler (something to do with gender studies, I forget the name).

Summarized, there's rarely a reward for being the vanguard who blazes the trail. Sometimes you might even be penalized because your methods to break into the limelight were extreme and are now hobbling your movement's mainstream appeal. The class's talking point was that there were women who fought their whole lives for the right to vote but never saw it happen or even begin to happen. But their work served to inspire activists of a later generation who went on to succeed. Sometimes we have to plant a garden knowing we might not see live to see the flowers bloom.

Clearly software is a different beast but we too, as an undustry, have things which are mainstream or valuable now but which once upon a time had only their visionaries to fight for them.

For locked down duopoly (85% and growing Google actually) walled garden, that has telemetry for every app launch, install, uninstall, access to every single push notification in plain text and can boot your "niche" app from the Play Store on a whim... Most of those newly connected to the internet are on locked down "smartphones" and not on general purpose computers anymore.

Even though i d say that a lot of innovation is stifled by regulatory constraints, the biggest one being: it's too hard to take payments and much harder to pay users. We have the technology to have digital cash on the internet but tax office won't let anyone use it

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21320938

There is still an unlimited amount of content, but the rules have changed significantly. And mostly not in favor of users.

The article offers bad examples, but monetary interests and copyright changed the nature of most content.

The US has a regulatory culture of permitting monopolies as long as they are lawfully gained. I don't think this is right. I also think a sequence of monopolies, each living 5 or 10 years, before being overtaken, is also wrong; just because a monopoly is eventually overtaken doesn't mean consumers must tolerate monopolies at their height.

"Being the change" means limiting maximum size and forcing competition through regulation. That's political. I don't think there's any choice at this point if we want to preserve democracy.

http://iwillansweryouremails.com

I like that I'm not tracking anyone, it doesn't require UI/UX, I have little to nothing to gain from it - it's just a human connection. Something fun we might have seen in the early years of the internet.

Some of the old-school web is still around, it's just down on page 20+ of Google and Bing.

SEO is tuned for Google, making it the inevitable victim of its own success.

Let a thousand algorithms bloom! Maybe we'll get a variety of search engine styles, in the same way we have different blood types to frustrate blood parasites.

In the early days of the Internet, for example, I wouldn't expect specialized information about, say, car repair to be found online anywhere, because the people who obsessed about that sort of thing weren't online. You did find some really specialized stuff, but it was more serendipity and hit-and-miss. You couldn't count on finding what you need.

These days, we tend to assume it's all out there, somewhere, and we should be able to find it with a simple search, assuming we can figure out the right keywords.

Probably when the first search result was a hobby page maintained by an espresso machine enthusiast. Those days ended early, but I remember the pre-commercial Web and it was a very different place.

To me this feels a bit like saying the music scene used to be better but now it's all calculated pop garbage. But really the music scene is bigger and more diverse than ever, it's just that pop music is what you'll find on the front page if you will.

The surface of anything, be it a city, street, store, product, hobby, etc, will always be susceptible to marketing and manipulation.

If you first-result your way to visit a new country you can easily end up flying to its main city, take an extremely expensive taxi from the airport to some luxurious looking hotel, where a tour company has scheduled your entire stay in various touristic areas and restaurants.

Some people enjoy this experience, and there's nothing wrong with it, but it's a typical first-result experience of traveling.

google wants to get paid, blog writers want to get paid, manufacturers want to make sales

the people with the lesser interest in profit (or attention $ instead of quality get buried because they dont make anybody else any money

https://www.consumersearch.com/

Visionaries are extremely rare. Most of us follow and copy existing work. All that said, I think your words are a bit too harsh. Average person are not that bad at creating, they are bad at willing to create, they tend to lack the drive to do so.

I think you're confusing not being able to create things with not being able to compete with people who are truly good at what they do.

Everyone can create stuff, it's just that most people aren't very good at it because they've not yet mastered what they're doing. The thing is though, that doesn't matter. If they enjoy the creative process then that's more than enough.

In the old days, when you joined a community it could be very insular. That's okay, there were communities for everything and everyone. So you had to read the rules, learn the lingo, and shut up and lurk for a while so you didn't invoke the wrath of the mods. Or you were gone.

Anti-social, attention-seeking, spammy, obnoxious or controlling behavior was simply not tolerated. What right did you have to come into another's home and begin making demands as to how they live their lives?

All of that has changed. The above behaviors are the new norm, thanks to the simultaneous nature of the walled gardens of social media and the fact that the walls are low enough that everyone can see into your garden.

Suddenly you have nosy neighbors saying, "Hey, I'll be honest, that crabgrass in your lawn is making it harder to appreciate the beauty of my own lawn. Maybe you should clean it up, everyone else is doing it, so you must be anti-social if you don't.

The entire meaning of the word "anti-social" has completely changed. I would consider most modern online communities to be extremely anti-social.

The only answer is a return to form, going back to individual communities where we can more freely express our opinions, just making sure to network our communities in such a way that compassion and sincerity flourish, and we don't just return to the echo chambers of the 90's (they did exist!).

The creators in the 90s created because there was very little to consume compared to today. When the creators of the 90s were kids they didn’t consume, because there was little to anything to consume. But creating software was limitless.

Creating content in someone’s platform is different than creating your own HTML experience. Both are relevant... but the percentage of creation should be a default skill of all users beyond working for companies for free to create user generated content to sell.

Now, my 5 year old nephew can do it. Before, it took dedication and creativity to put something together. It's now more difficult to find needles in the haystack.

It seems measured elitism is the only answer.

Maybe email was also a lot less tedious back then - it strikes me that these days the main purposes of email accounts are to allow registration with other online services and to hold the huge amount of spam that usually happens as a result of registering for online services.

I don't know many people my age (Gen-Y) who would even dream of using their personal email accounts to actually communicate with actual people outside of places where it is strictly required (like applying for jobs), even less so their friends. They're too used to services run by corporate giants (like FAANG) and are being trained to interact in very specific ways, e.g. in direct messages in apps, in the comments sections or through "Like" and "reactions" buttons.

Liberally using the 'hide' button also helps, but only yourself. You kind of need to cull out a third of it. One of these days I'm going to make a custom skin that filters out the worst of the hosts that clog up the front page.

As for advertising taking over the place, it's just getting insane with them being inserted inline in article content and increasing the page load time significantly, appearing at the beginning of videos or, worse, half-way through them, making pages more resource-intensive and less responsive.

The web has never been so widely accessible and yet it has never been more inaccessible.

We had skype, games, ICQ, MSN, blogs, blog aggregators, rss readers, galleries, audiogalaxy, guestbooks, forums, hotline communications, IRC, video chats, joomla, wikis etc etc in the year 2003. Not much has been added. Video is perhaps the only thing that we didnt have. A big deal but it s not everything. The main change was the format - mobile. The internet today feels less vibrant, less mysterious, with less corners to explore, and it's not because we 've exhausted it all. Even the news have become extremely repetitive, with every site posting the same stories slightly rephrsed. People keep parroting the same obsessive ideas over and over and over in their comments. Everything is memes, and that everything is actually a small number of ideas being produced every day, possibly countable in one hand. You have to dig hard into social forums to find a unique perspective, as the self-congratulating, selfimportant crowds seem to have crowded out everyone else.

Anecdotally, how many sites do you find yourselves browsing daily?

Mostly those have been replaced by FB groups, reddit and other feed based aggregators so that it's interesting for a few hours, then lost (almost) without trace. It relies on you being active enough to see it when it was posted. Even blogs are fading, unless sales focused tied to your company... There's more code out there on github, but that's just one aspect of creation.

I see almost infinitely less lasting creation, with a few remaining islands, but an awful lot more rhetoric and pontificating. Which used to be mostly the easily avoided preserve of some of the newsgroups. :)